Taş Tepeler

Deep time

Older than everything.

Göbekli Tepe rose about 11,500 years ago — some 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, 6,000 before Stonehenge, and long before writing, the wheel, or farming itself. Follow the line down, and watch how far back it really goes.

7,000 yrs before the pyramids 6,000 before Stonehenge Before writing & the wheel

Scroll into the past↓

c. 9700 BCE
The Ice Age ends
The last glacial age releases its grip. The world warms, and hunter-gatherers move through the hills of Şanlıurfa.
200 years
c. 9500 BCE
Göbekli Tepe
Hunter-gatherers raise rings of carved T-pillars taller than themselves — the oldest monumental architecture known on Earth.
100 years
c. 9400 BCE
Karahan Tepe
Chambers are cut into living bedrock — a room of stone pillars and a human face rising from the rock floor.
400 years
c. 9000 BCE
Sayburç
On a carved bench, a man grips his sides between two leopards and faces a charging bull — one of the oldest narrative scenes ever made.
400 years
c. 8600 BCE
Nevalı Çori
A nearby village raises its own T-pillars and cult building — Göbekli's world spreading across the hills.
100 years
c. 8500 BCE
Farming takes hold
Only now does agriculture become a way of life. Göbekli's builders were still hunter-gatherers — the monuments came first.
500 years
c. 8000 BCE
Jericho's tower
One of the first great stone structures of a settlement rises at Jericho.
900 years
c. 7100 BCE
Çatalhöyük
One of the first towns — mud-brick houses packed wall to wall, entered through holes in their roofs.
100 years
c. 7000 BCE
The first pottery
Fired clay vessels come into everyday use across the Near East.
Then — the long silence.Nearly two thousand years pass · no one raises monuments like these again
c. 5000 BCE
The first metal
People begin smelting copper — the first step beyond stone, long after the temples were buried.
1,000 years
c. 4000 BCE
The first cities
Uruk rises in Mesopotamia — humanity's first true city, and still 5,000 years younger than Göbekli Tepe.
500 years
c. 3500 BCE
The wheel
The wheel is invented — thousands of years after the first temples were already gone.
200 years
c. 3300 BCE
Writing begins
The first writing — cuneiform — is pressed into clay in Sumer. Recorded history starts here; everything above this point is prehistory.
100 years
c. 3200 BCE
Newgrange
Ireland's great passage tomb is built — older than Stonehenge and the pyramids, yet still 6,000 years after the first temples.
650 years
c. 2560 BCE
The Great Pyramid
Giza's Great Pyramid is built — nearly 7,000 years after Göbekli Tepe. To the Egyptians who raised it, the first temples were already unimaginably ancient.
60 years
c. 2500 BCE
Stonehenge
Stonehenge's great sarsens are finally raised — some 6,000 years after the hills of Şanlıurfa.
1,750 years
c. 753 BCE
Rome is founded
Rome begins — almost nine thousand years after the first temples were built and deliberately buried.
750 years
1 CE
The Common Era begins
Two thousand years ago. By now Göbekli Tepe had lain buried and forgotten for eight thousand years.
1,000 years
c. 1000 CE
A thousand years ago
The whole of recorded history — pharaohs to now — fits in the final sliver of this line.
1,000 years
2026 CE
You are here
Closer in time to the Great Pyramid than the pyramid ever was to Göbekli Tepe.

Now go and stand where it began.

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